Chapter 11

The boy's face went white before his brain grasped the sentence. His first sense was of utter helplessness, almost of betrayal. From the day of his escape he had been conscious of a weak spot in his story. To himself he could justify his conduct throughout; and by dint of rehearsing over and over again the pros and contras, always as an advocate for the defence, he had persuaded himself at times that every sensible person must agree with him. What consideration, to begin with, could any of the English _detenus_ owe to Bonaparte, who by seizing them had broken the good faith between nations? Promises, again, are not unconditional; they hold so long as he to whom they are given abides by his counter-obligations, stated or implied. . . . Walter had a score of good arguments to satisfy himself. Nevertheless he had felt that to satisfy his father they would need to be well presented. He had counted on his mother's help and Father Halloran's. Why, for the first time in his life, had these two deserted him? Never in the same degree had he wanted their protection. His mind groped in a void. He felt horribly alone.

And yet, while he sought for reasons against this sentence, he knew the real reason to be that he could not face it. He hated suffering: a world which demanded suffering of him was wholly detestable, irrational, monstrous: he desired no more to do with it. What had he done to be used so? He knew himself for a harmless fellow, wishing hurt to no man. Then why on earth could he not be let alone? He had never asked to be born: he had no wish to live at all, if living involved all this misery. It had been bad enough in Dinan before his escape; but to tread back that weary road in proclaimed dishonour, exposed to contemptuous eyes at every halting-place, and to take up the burden again plus the shame--it was unthinkable, and he came near to a hysterical laugh at the command. He felt as a horse might feel when spurred up to a fence which it cannot face and foresees it must refuse at the last moment.

"Return--return to Dinan?" he echoed, his white lips shaking on each word.

"Certainly you will return to Dinan. For God's sake--" The Squire checked himself, and his tenderness swelled suddenly above his scorn. He rose from the table, stepped to the boy, and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Walter," he said, "we have somehow managed to make a mess of it. You have behaved disreputably; and if the blame of it, starting from somewhere in the past, lies at your mother's door or mine, we must sorrowfully beg your pardon. The thing is done: it is reparable, but only through your suffering. You are the last a Cleeve, and with our faults we a Cleeves have lived cleanly and honourably. Be a man: take up this burden which I impose, and redeem your honour. For your mother's sake and mine I could ask it: but how can we separate ourselves from you? Look in my face. Are there no traces in it of these last two years? Boy, boy, you have not been the only one to suffer! If further suffering of ours could help you, would it not be given? But a man's honour lies ultimately in his own hands. Go, lad--endure what you must--and God support you with the thought that we are learning pride in you!"

"It will kill me!"

The lad blurted it out with a sob. His father's hand dropped from his shoulder.

"Are you incapable of understanding that it might do worse?" he asked coldly, and turned his back in despair.

Walter went out unsteadily, fumbling his way.

The Squire dined alone that night, and after dinner sat long alone before his library fire--how long he scarcely knew; but Narracott, the butler, had put up the bolts and retired, leaving only the staircase-lantern burning, when Father Halloran knocked at the library door and was bidden to enter.

"I wished to speak with you about Walter--to learn your decision," he explained.

"You have not seen him?"

"Not since he came to explain himself."

"He is in his room, I believe. He is to be ready at eight to-morrow to start with me for Plymouth."

"I looked for that decision," said the priest, after a moment's silence.

"Would you have suggested another?" The question came sharp and stern; but a moment later the Squire mollified it, turning to the priest and looking him straight in the eyes. "Excuse me; I am sure you would not."

"I thank you," was the answer. "No: since I have leave to say so, I think you have taken the only right course."

The two men still faced one another. Fate had made them antagonists in this house, and the antagonism had lasted over many years. But no petulant word had ever broken down the barrier of courtesy between them: each knew the other to be a gentleman.

"Father Halloran," said the Squire gravely, "I will confess to you that I have been tempted. If I could honestly have spared the lad--"

"I know," said the priest, and nodded while Mr. a Cleeve seemed to search for a word. "If any sacrifice of your own could stand for payment, you could have offered it, sir."

"What I fear most is that it may kill his mother." The Squire said it musingly, but his voice held a question.

"She will suffer." The priest pondered his opinion as he gave it, and his words came irregularly by twos and threes. "It may be hard--for some while--to make her see the--the necessity. Women fight for their own by instinct--right or wrong, they do not ask themselves. If you reason, they will seize upon any sophistry to confute you--to persuade themselves. Doubtless the instinct comes from God; but to men, sometimes, it makes them seem quite unscrupulous."

"We have built much upon Walter. If our hopes have come down with a crash, we must rebuild, and build them better. I think that, for the future, you and I must consult one another and make allowances. The fact is, I am asking you--as it were--to make terms with me over the lad. 'A house divided,' you know. . . Let us have an end of divisions. I am feeling terribly old to-night."

The priest met his gaze frankly, and had half extended his hand, when a sudden sound arrested him--a sound at which the eyes of both men widened with surprise and their lips were parted--the sharp report of a gun. Not until it shattered the silence of the woods around Cleeve Court could you have been aware how deep the silence had lain. Its echoes banged from side to side of the valley, and in the midst of their reverberation a second gun rang out.

"The mischief!" exclaimed the Squire. "That means poachers, or I'm a Dutchman. Macklin's in trouble. Will you come?" He stepped quickly to the door. "Where did you fix the sound? Somewhere up the valley, near the White Rock, eh?"

Father Halloran's face was white as a ghost's. "It--it was outside the house," he stammered.

"Outside? What the deuce--Of course it was outside!" He paused, and seemed to read the priest's thought. "Oh, for God's sake, man--" Hurrying into the passage, and along it to the hall, he called up, "Walter! Walter!" from the foot of the staircase. "There, you see!" he muttered, as Walter's voice answered from above.

But almost on the instant a woman's voice took up the cry. "Walter! What has happened to Walter?" and as her son stepped out upon the landing Mrs. a Cleeve came tottering through the corridor leading to her rooms--came in disarray, a dressing-gown hastily caught about her, and a wisp of grey hair straggling across her shoulder. Catching sight of Walter, she almost fell into his arms.

"Thank God! Thank God you are safe!"

"But what on earth is the matter?" demanded Walter, scarcely yet aroused from the torpor of his private misery.

"Poachers, no doubt." his father answered. "Macklin has been warning me of this for some time. Take your mother back to her room. There is no cause for alarm, Lucetta--if the affair were serious, we should have heard more guns before this. You had best return to bed at once. When I learn what has happened I will bring you word."

He strode away down the lower corridor, calling as he went to Narracott, the butler, to fetch a lantern and unbolt the hall-door, and entered the gunroom with Father Halloran at his heels.

"I cannot ask you to take a hand in this," he said, finding his favourite gun and noiselessly disengaging it from the rack, pitch dark though the room was.

"I may carry a spare weapon for you, I hope?"

"Ah, you will go with me? Thank you: I shall be glad of someone to carry the lantern. We may have to do some scrambling: Narracott is infirm, and Roger,"--this was the footman--"is a chicken-hearted fellow, I suspect."

The two men armed themselves and went back to the hall, where Father Halloran in silence took the lantern from the butler. Then they stepped out into the night.

Masses of cloud obscured the stars, and the two walked forward into a wall of darkness which the rays of the priest's lantern pierced for a few yards ahead. Here in the valley the night air lay stagnant: scarcely a leaf rustled: their ears caught no sound but that of the brook alongside of which they mounted the coombe.

"Better set down the lantern and stand wide of it," said the Squire, as they reached the foot of the White Rock gully. "If they are armed, and mean business, we are only offering them a shot." He paused at the sound of a quick, light footstep behind him, not many paces away, and wheeled about. "Who's there?" he challenged in a low, firm voice.

"It's I, father." Walter, also with a gun under his arm, came forward and halted in the outer ring of light.

"H'm," the Squire muttered testily. "Better you were in bed, I should say. This may be a whole night's business, and you have a long journey before you tomorrow."

The boy's face was white: he seemed to shiver at his father's words, and Father Halloran, accustomed to read his face, saw, or thought he saw-- years afterwards told himself that he saw--a hunted, desperate look in it, as of one who forces himself into the company he most dreads rather than remain alone with his own thoughts. And yet, whenever he remembered this look, always he remembered too that the lad's jaw had closed obstinately, as though upon a resolve long in making but made at last.

But as the three stood there a soft whistle sounded from the bushes across the gully, and Jim Burdon pushed a ghostly face into the penumbra.

"Is that you, sir? Then we'll have them for sure."

"Who is it, Jim?"

"Hannaford and that long-legged boy of his. Macklin's up a-top keeping watch, sir. I've winged one of 'em; can't be sure which. If you and his Reverence--"

Jim paused suddenly, with his eyes on the half-lit figure of Walter a Cleeve, recognising him not only as his young master, supposed to be in France, but as the stranger he had seen that afternoon talking with Hannaford. For Walter had changed only his sabots.

The Squire saw and interpreted his dismay. "Go on, man," he said hoarsely; "it's no ghost."

Jim's face cleared. "Your servant, Mr. Walter! A rum mistake I made then, this afternoon; but it's all right as things turn out. They're both hereabout, sir, somewheres on the face of the rock, and the one of 'em hurt, I reckon. Macklin'll keep the top: there's no way off the west side; and if you and his Reverence'll work up along the gully here while I try up the face, we'll have the pair for a certainty. Better douse the light though; I've a bull's-eye here that'll search every foot of the way, and they haven't a gun."

"That's right enough," the Squire answered; "but it's foolishness to douse the light. We'll set it up on the stones here at the mouth of the gully while Walter and I work up to the left of the gully and you up the rock. It will light up their only bolt-hole; and if you, Father Halloran, will keep an eye on it from the bushes here you will have light enough to see their faces to swear by before they reach it. No need to shoot: only keep your eyes open before they come abreast of it; for they'll make for it at once, to kick it over--if they risk a bolt this way, which I doubt."

"Why not let me try up the gully between you and Jim?" Walter suggested.

His father considered a moment. "Very well, I'll flank you on the left up the hedge, and Jim will take the rock. You're pretty sure they're there, Jim?"

"I'd put a year's wages on it," answered Jim.

So the three began their climb. At his post below Father Halloran judged from the pace at which Walter started that he would soon lead the others; for Jim had a climb to negotiate which was none too easy, even by daylight, and the Squire must fetch a considerable _detour_ before he struck the hedge, along which, moreover, he would be impeded by brambles and undergrowth. He saw this, but it was too late to call a warning.

Walter, beyond reach of the lantern's rays, ascended silently enough, but at a gathering pace. He forgot the necessity of keeping in line. It did not occur to him that his father must be dropping far behind: rather, his presence seemed beside him, inexorable, dogging him with the morrow's unthinkable compulsion. What mad adventure was this? Here he was at home hunting Charley Hannaford. Well, but his father was close at hand, and Father Halloran just below, who had always protected him. At this game he could go on for ever, if only it would stave off tomorrow. To-morrow--

A couple of lithe arms went about him in the darkness. A voice spoke hoarse and quick in his ear--spoke, though for the moment he was chiefly aware of its hot breath.

"Broke your word, did ye? Set them on to us, you blasted young sprig! Look 'ee here--I've a knife to your ribs, and you can't use your gun. Stand still while my boy slips across, or I'll cut your white heart out. . ."

Walter a Cleeve stood still. He felt, rather than heard, a figure limp by and steal across the gully. A slight sound of a little loose earth dribbling reached him a moment later from the opposite bank of the gully. Then, after a long pause, the arms about him relaxed. Charles Hannaford was gone.

Still Walter a Cleeve did not move. He stared up into the wall of darkness on his left, wondering stupidly why his father did not shoot.

Then he put out his hand: it encountered a bramble bush.

He drew a long spray of the bramble towards him, fingering it very carefully, following the spines of its curved prickles, and, having found its leafy end, drew it meditatively through the trigger-guard of his gun.

The countryside scoffed at the finding of the coroner's jury that the last heir of the a Cleeves had met his death by misadventure. Shortly after the inquest Charley Hannaford disappeared with his family, and this lent colour to their gossip. But Jim Burdon, who had been the first to arrive on the scene, told his plain tale, and, for the rest, kept his counsel. And so did Father Halloran and the Squire.

THE COLABORATORS.

OR, THE COMEDY THAT WROTE ITSELF AS RELATED BY G. A. RICHARDSON.

I.

How pleasant it is to have money, heigho! How pleasant it is to have money!

Sings (I think) Clough. Well, I had money, and more of it than I felt any desire to spend; which is as much as any reasonable man can want. My age was five-and-twenty, my health good, my conscience moderately clean, and my appetite excellent: I had fame in some degree, and a fair prospect of adding to it: and I was unmarried. In later life a man may seek marriage for its own sake, but at five-and-twenty he marries against his will--because he has fallen in love with a woman; and this had not yet happened to me. I was a bachelor, and content to remain one.

To come to smaller matters--The month was early June, the weather perfect, the solitude of my own choosing, and my posture comfortable enough to invite drowsiness. I had bathed and, stretched supine in the shade of a high sand-bank, was smoking the day's first cigarette. Behind me lay Ambleteuse; before me, the sea. On the edge of it, their shrill challenges softened by the distance to music, a score of children played with spades and buckets, innocently composing a hundred pretty groups of brown legs, fluttered hair, bright frocks and jerseys, and innocently conspiring with morning to put a spirit of youth into the whole picture. Beyond them the blue sea flashed with its own smiles, and the blue heaven over them with the glancing wings of gulls. On this showing it is evident that I, George Anthony Richardson, ought to have been happy; whereas, in fact, Richardson was cheerful enough, but George Anthony restless and ill-content: by reason that Richardson, remembering the past, enjoyed by contrast the present, and knew himself to be jolly well off; while George Anthony, likewise remembering the past, felt gravely concerned for the future.

Let me explain. A year ago I had been a clerk in the Office of the Local Government Board--a detested calling with a derisory stipend. It was all that a University education (a second in Moderations and a third in _Literae Humaniores_) had enabled me to win, and I stuck to it because I possessed no patrimony and had no 'prospects' save one, which stood precariously on the favour of an uncle--my mother's brother, Major-General Allan Mclntosh, C.B. Now the General could not be called an indulgent man. He had retired from active service to concentrate upon his kinsfolk those military gifts which even on the wide plains of Hindostan had kept him the terror of his country's foes and the bugbear of his own soldiery. He had an iron sense of discipline and a passion for it; he detested all forms of amusement; in religion he belonged to the sect of the Peculiar People; and he owned a gloomy house near the western end of the Cromwell Road, where he dwelt and had for butler, valet, and factotum a Peculiar Person named Trewlove.

In those days I found my chief recreation in the theatre; and by-and-by, when I essayed to write for it, and began to pester managers with curtain-raisers, small vaudevilles, comic libretti and the like, you will guess that in common prudence I called myself by a _nom de guerre_. Dropping the 'Richardson,' I signed my productions 'George Anthony,' and as 'George Anthony' the playgoing public now discusses me. For some while, I will confess, the precaution was superfluous, the managers having apparently entered into league to ensure me as much obscurity as I had any use for. But at length in an unguarded moment the manager of the Duke of Cornwall's Theatre (formerly the Euterpe) accepted a three-act farce. It was poorly acted, yet for some reason it took the town. '_Larks in Aspic_, a Farcical Comedy by George Anthony,' ran for a solid three hundred nights; and before it ceased my unsuspecting uncle had closed his earthly career, leaving me with seventy thousand pounds (the bulk of it invested in India Government stock), the house in the Cromwell Road, and, lastly, in sacred trust, his faithful body-servant, William John Trewlove.

Here let me pause to deplore man's weakness and the allurement of splendid possessions. I had been happy enough in my lodgings in Jermyn Street, and, thanks to _Larks in Aspic_, they were decently furnished. At the prompting, surely, of some malignant spirit, I exchanged them for a house too large for me in a street too long for life, for my uncle's furniture (of the Great Exhibition period), and for the unnecessary and detested services of Trewlove.

This man enjoyed, by my uncle's will, an annuity of fifty pounds. He had the look, too, of one who denied himself small pleasures, not only on religious grounds, but because they cost money. Somehow, I never doubted that he owned a balance at the bank, or that, after a brief interval spent in demonstrating that our ways were uncongenial, he would retire on a competence and await translation to join my uncle in an equal sky--equal, that is, within the fence of the elect. But not a bit of it! I had been adjured in the will to look after him: and at first I supposed that he clung to me against inclination, from a conscientious resolve to give me every chance. By-and-by, however, I grew aware of a change in him; or, rather, of some internal disquiet, suppressed but volcanic, working towards a change. Once or twice he staggered me by answering some casual question in a tone which, to say the least of it, suggested an ungainly attempt at facetiousness. A look at his sepulchral face would reassure me, but did not clear up the mystery. Something was amiss with Trewlove.

The horrid truth broke upon me one day as we discussed the conduct of one of my two housemaids. Trewlove, returning one evening (as I gathered) from a small _reunion_ of his fellow-sectarians in the Earl's Court Road, had caught her in the act of exchanging railleries from an upper window with a trooper in the 2nd Life Guards, and had reported her.

"Most unbecoming," said I.

"Unwomanly," said Trewlove, with a sudden contortion of the face; "unwomanly, sir!--but ah, how like a woman!"

I stared at him for one wild moment, and turned abruptly to the window. The rascal had flung a quotation at me--out of _Larks in Aspic!_ He knew, then! He had penetrated the disguise of "George Anthony," and, worse still, he meant to forgive it. His eye had conveyed a dreadful promise of complicity. Almost--I would have given worlds to know, and yet I dared not face it--almost it had been essaying a wink!

I dismissed him with instructions--not very coherent, I fear--to give the girl a talking-to, and sat down to think. How long had he known?--that was my first question, and in justice to him it had to be considered: since, had he known and kept the secret in my uncle's lifetime, beyond a doubt, and unpleasant as the thought might be, I was enormously his debtor. That stern warrior's attitude towards the playhouse had ever been uncompromising. Stalls, pit, and circles--the very names suggested Dantesque images and provided illustrations for many a discourse. Themselves verbose, these discourses indicated A Short Way with Stage-players, and it stood in no doubt that the authorship of _Larks in Aspic_ had only to be disclosed to him to provide me with the shortest possible cut out of seventy thousand pounds.

I might, and did, mentally consign Trewlove to all manner of painful places, as, for instance, the bottom of the sea; but I could not will away this obligation. After cogitating for awhile I rang for him.

"Trewlove," said I, "you know, it seems, that I have written a play."

"Yessir! _Larks in Aspic_, sir."

I winced. "Since when have you known this?"

The dog, I am sure, took the bearings of this question at once. But he laid his head on one side, and while he pulled one whisker, as if ringing up the information, his eyes grew dull and seemed to be withdrawing into visions of a far-away past. "I have been many times to see it, Mr. George, and would be hard put to it to specify the first occasion. But it was a mattinay."

"That is not what I asked, Trewlove. I want to know when you first suspected or satisfied yourself that I was the author."

"Oh, at once, sir! The style, if I may say so, was unmistakable: _in_-nimitable, sir, if I may take the libbaty."

"Excuse me," I began; but he did not hear. He had passed for the moment beyond decorum, and his eyes began to roll in a manner expressive of inward rapture, but not pretty to watch.

"I had not listened to your talk, sir, in private life--I had not, as one might say, imbibed it--for nothink. The General, sir--your lamented uncle--had a flow: he would, if allowed, and meaning no disrespect, talk the hind leg off a jackass; but I found him lacking in 'umour. Now you, Mr. George, 'ave 'umour. You 'ave not your uncle's flow, sir--the Lord forbid! But in give-and-take, as one might say, you are igstreamly droll. On many occasions, sir, when you were extra sparkling I do assure you it required pressure not to igsplode."